Posts Tagged ‘ALS’

Soon, the Ice Bucket Challenge craze will burn out. It’s been extremely successful, but as the gimmick runs its course and America goes back to school, the ALS Association won’t keep receiving average donations of more than $1 million per day as they have during the month of August.

Maybe you already have some ice bucket fatigue of your own. After all, how many videos of a friend dumping ice on her head can you watch before you start ignoring them all?

In the short term, it’s clear this campaign worked, even if unintentionally. It’s wonderful they raised so much money. It’s also wonderful that so many people are more aware of ALS.

But in the long term, this stunt’s success has created some big challenges:

Most only donated because a friend challenged them to do so.

These new donors may not care about ALS as a long-term issue.

They likely have no lasting relationship with the ALS charity to which they donated.

So, is there really an opportunity to steward any of the nearly 500,000 new donors up the “ladder of engagement?” Is there a chance to turn some of these impulse donors into lifetime supporters? ALS charities may have hit the jackpot, but now the hard work of cultivation begins.

How can the Ice Bucket Challenge have a long term positive impact for the ALS Association?

The answer can be found by remembering the oldest sales trick in the book.

Dan Ariely, the popular author and behavioral economist, spent years recovering from 3rd degree burns on 70% of his body. His treatments were extremely painful. The nurses removed his bandages daily to soak him in a disinfectant bath using the “rip-off-the-Band-Aid-as-quickly-as-possible” method. I use that same method with my kids. Best to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Years later, Ariely wanted to know if this made sense. So he performed a study (he is a behavioral economist after all) and guess what? The nurses had it all wrong. Turns out it’s significantly preferable to minimize the intensity of the pain by going slower, even if that means drawing out the process. Oops.

He went back to the hospital to present his findings, certain that the nurses would immediately change their approach. They didn’t react quite the way he expected.

But how the nurses did react tells us something interesting and important — something that also explains a key reason why the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has been such a great success.